Exhibit celebrates beloved jazz vocalist, daughter of Baltimore

A portrait of Ethel Ennis and purple neon sign saying - Known for her philosophy of 'soft power,' Ethel Ennis said she was proud to have bloomed where she was planted, in her hometown of Baltimore. Now memorabilia from her long international career lives on in the Sheridan Libraries archives at Johns Hopkins and is on display at the George Peabody Library through April 14. At first, Tonika Berkley was mystified by the markings she found on the sheet music that once belonged to Ethel Ennis, the Baltimore-based international jazz musician. They marched across the page where lyrics would go on a sheet of music, but they looked more like horizontal lines with squiggles at the end. Then, as the Africana archivist for the Sheridan Libraries and the Billie Holiday Center for Liberation Arts pored over some of Ennis's papers from her studies at business school, she recognized the same marks and realized they were shorthand. Ennis had blended her B-School skills with her musical ones to create a resource tailor-made for herself. Ethel's Place: Celebrating Ethel Ennis, Baltimore's First Lady of Jazz Devoted to Baltimore vocalist Ethel Ennis (1932 - 2019), this landmark exhibition at George Peabody Library explores each era of the singer's remarkable life "Most of the piano and vocal sheets feature Ennis's handwritten notations, abbreviated using stenography notes so that she could remember her lyrics easier," Berkley said.